Europe Road Trip: Day 5 - Europa Park

The weather was gorgeous for our day at Europa Park. According to Google Maps it was about a 30 minute drive from the hotel, but the German road system had other ideas, and had decided to close a road without telling anyone. As such, our "nice, direct route" turned into a dead end, and we took an impromptu tour of the back streets of Offenburg trying to work out where on earth we were going.

Eventually we found our way onto the main route to Europa Park. There was a fair bit of other traffic, and it wasn't until we were close that I realised they were all going to the same place as us. So much for off peak!

I needn't have worried - the park itself was vast. Easily the biggest place we'd visited so far, it was divided into a number of different areas each themed around a different country - think Disney's Epcot, but without the giant lake or bizarre presidential show. It's owned by Mack, who make a large number of theme park rides, and as such they use it as something of a showroom, so a huge proportion of the rides are from that one manufacturer.

Towering above the car park was an exception to the Mack rule, Silver Star, a B&M hypercoaster, which we made our first calling point. It was everything it promised to be - tall, fast and smooth. We sat towards the back and enjoyed the airtime from the hills. Great fun.

Next up we tried Poseidon, the first water coaster I'd ever been on. Sitting somewhere between a log flume and a roller coaster, you travel in 8-seater boats around a rollercoaster style track for parts, with drops and twists, but then also have splashdown sections into water where you float along like a boat. It was a lot of fun, though in the hot weather of the day I would have liked to get wetter than it made you.

Next-door was Pegasus, a family coaster themed around the horse-type-thing (yes I know, my Greek mythology is a bit rubbish.) The park were trying to push a VR experience where you rode with a headset on, similar to Galactica at Alton Towers, but this was an upcharge and we decided we'd rather just have a go on the standard ride. For a family coaster it was very fast and good fun, and I enjoyed it more than I'd imagined.

Across the way we went on the Matterhorn Blitz. This was a wild mouse style coaster with a twist. You enter through a cottage, with someone in bed, someone else mopping the floor and some people in the kitchen preparing dinner. Throughout the park various rides had animatronics as part of their theming which added its own bit of charm. After the queue you boarded small cars which went forward out of the station, but instead of the usual lift hill, were instead loaded into a vertical lift. I say vertical - it actually tilted from side to side as it went up (look on YouTube if you don't believe me) - then at the top, sent you off around the track. It was a nice twist on what can otherwise be a dull, uncomfortable type of ride.

Euro Mir, our next ride, was quite something to look at - it was built around several tall cylindrical towers, with the ride track curling and twisting around them. It's a variant of the spinning coaster, except that unlike the Maurer-Sohne models you may have seen at Alton Towers or Chessington, there are four individual cars made up into a train, and the spinning is controlled by the track. My advice would be: don't sit in the front car - on the lift hill all the others get to spin except this one. The rest of the ride was... all right. I wasn't blown away by it if I'm honest.

By now the weather had really got warm, so we made the Fjord Rafting rapids ride our next stop. Thankfully it had a very small queue so we were quickly loaded into the 6-seater boats. The course was nice and long with some good waves - RJ got fairly wet and I stayed fairly dry, and of course by the time we got to the on ride photo our backs were to the camera so no pictures there!

Talking of getting wet, Atlantica in the Portugal area was a spectacular looking ride. Boarding large rafts you're taken up a lift hill and loaded onto a turntable, which turns you 90 degrees and sends you backwards down a bit of coaster track and back up onto another turntable, and from there down a hill and into the water below. As with Poseidon you didn't get as wet as it looked - in fact I later got a much better splashing by (deliberately) standing on the path next to the ride. Decent fun though.

Behind Atlantica, visible from quite some distance, was Wodun, which as the name suggests is a GCI wooden coaster. A very high wooden coaster. Like the one we rode at Parc Asterix it was fast and relentless, with some great drops and tight twists. I enjoyed it a lot - it's hard to decide at this point which of the two I preferred.

Next-door was Blue Fire, a very eyecatching ride, and the only one in the park with inversions. It's a LIM launched coaster and had an interesting feature on its trains - you could hold onto handles in front of you and see your pulse readout in real time. The only thing was it didn't seem particularly reliable - as far as I could make out, RJ was clinically dead! The ride itself was great though - fast and exciting - probably my favourite ride in the park.

Still rather warm, we turned to the other water ride we'd not yet tried - Tirol the log flume. There's not a lot to say about this - it's a very bog-standard log flume, but it was certainly refreshing! Outside was a waveswinger ride, which had fountains round the outside. We'd hoped it was going to be like the Monkey Swinger at Chessington, where you get squirted with water during the ride, but instead they were synchronised with the ride music and bobbed up and down as the tune played. The only person who got wet was a guy in front of me who accidentally put his foot through one as the ride slowed!

It was around lunchtime by now and we decided to go and look for something to eat. On the way, however, we spotted one of the newer attractions, and one I'd completely overlooked - Arthur. Now this appeared to be themed around a film I've not seen, but I didn't care - the ride itself was spectacular. Your first glimpse of it from outside were some tracks, from which hung the ride vehicles, people's legs dangling free. Inside the grass-covered dome of the ride building, the cars whooshed around overhead. The theming was absolutely top notch throughout, with gorgeous scenery everywhere. Even in the station the attention to detail was immense. The ride itself is combination of dark ride and rollercoaster, with slow sections around video or animatronics, coupled with faster parts. I felt it was the ride Euro Mir should have been - and it's a family ride!

We found a lovely little cafeteria to have lunch. Rather than the usual theme park "burger and fries" which we'd found at Disney, it served pizza and pasta (well, it was in the Italy area), so RJ got himself a pizza and I had a rather lovely salmon tagliatelle dish. It wasn't ridiculously expensive (I paid about €12 for mine) and was delicious.

While we let that settle, we'd spotted a haunted house style ride next door. When I'd mentioned we were visiting Europa Park, a friend had commented "I"m amazed Disney haven't sued them yet!" On riding this, I can see why. You start by going into an octagonal room with portraits on the wall. Suddenly the floor starts to lower, making the walls stretch upwards and the portraits expand to reveal more detail. The scene finishes with a body dropping from a noose through the ceiling. Is this sounding familiar to anyone? If you've ever been on any version of Disney's Haunted Mansion it may. It was even more familiar when we entered the loading station, to be greeted with an omnimover type system - a chain of identical 2-seater cars in a continuous loop. These looked exactly like the ones from the Disney ride. As we proceeded through, the scenes were all eerily familiar (though often with physical figurines replacing the Pepper's Ghost effect characters from Disney). Uncanny.

Taking it up a notch, while continuing the Disney references, Euro Sat was described to me as "a sort of Space Mountain, but in the golfball from Epcot." It's basically that, but instead of Space Mountain replace it with "the lasers and music from X at Thorpe Park". Though it's much better than X, but then so are most things...

One ride we'd missed out earlier in our hurry to get on the big coasters was the Swiss Bob - a Mack (who else makes them?) bobsleigh coaster. It was similar to (but faster than) the one we'd ridden at Parc Asterix, though slightly shorter too. Still a giggle though.

Two rides we'd done earlier but failed to get a decent on-ride photo from were Silver Star and Poseidon, so we went round for a second attempt. That's the only reason, honest... it's not like we really enjoyed them the first time and wanted another go, right?

Cassandra's Curse was a ride we'd spotted the first time we did Poseidon, but had ignored at the time. It turned out to be a small Madhouse attraction - the main ride being the same size as The Haunting at Drayton Manor, but with no pre-show it felt a bit odd to just go straight in. Next-door was Atlantis Adventure, a dark ride where you had to shoot a laser gun at various targets, like in Duel or Tomb Raider. For the first time ever on one of those sort of rides, RJ beat me (but not by much!) so I decided I didn't like it as much :)

Going back to the Disney comparisons from earlier, Pirates of Batavia is an almost identical clone of Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland Paris, down to there being a restaurant abutting one of the scenes! Again, I'm amazed Disney haven't noticed...

Another batch of re-rides followed - a cool-down on Fjord Rafting, a zoom around Blue Fire and another rattle through Wodun. A bit of gift shopping followed, plus we decided to give the Alpine Coaster a go - this was a Mack powered coaster similar to the Runaway Mine Train at Alton, Scorpion Express at Chessington or Flying Fish at Thorpe. This had the nice addition of a themed indoor section set around a jewel mine, which was very pretty.

Finally we decided it'd be convenient to grab dinner in the park (RJ had chicken, I stooped to a burger) followed by one last lap of Silver Star in the back row and then it was time to go back to the hotel.

Well, it would have been had the German roads not been playing silly buggers again. The motorway was apparently jammed up, so Google Maps was sending us into Offenburg via a back road, which left us trailing behind several slow lorries before finally abandoning us at a road closure it didn't know was there. Using a combination of careful judgement and blind guessing we made our way around it, and eventually turned up back in the village for our hotel around an hour later. The place we'd parked the day before was filled and the car park around the corner was also full, so we spent a good 20 minutes doing loops of the village streets and reversing out of people's driveways before eventually finding a spot behind someone else's vehicle and hoping it'd still be there in the morning. As I write this, that's still to be seen...

The scores so far
Favourite Coaster	Osiris, Parc Asterix
Least Favourite Coaster	Euro Mir, Europa Park
Favourite Non-Coaster	Tower of Terror, Disney Studios
Least Favourite Non-Coaster	Cassandra's Curse
Best Food	Europa Park
Worst Food	Disney Explorers Hotel
Most Idiots Smoking	Parc Asterix
Best Theming	Disneyland Park